Princeton, as the outright Ivy League champion, is the No. 1 seed and will take on fourth-seeded Brown at 4:30, followed by No. 2 Columbia and No. 3 Harvard. The winners will play Saturday at 5:30 for the tournament championship and the Ivy League's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.
Nothing that happens in the tournament will change who the 2026 Ivy League champion is. That will be Princeton, not matter what.
The semifinals can be seen on ESPN+. The final will be on ESPNU.
If you're looking for tickets, click HERE.
And with that, TigerBlog segues to something that he finds amazing.
The Princeton women's basketball team enters the Ivy League tournament at Cornell Friday with a record of 24-3. Not bad, right?
Given that the Tigers can lose no more than one game in Ivy Madness and no more than one game in the postseason awaits after that (almost surely the NCAA tournament), the maximum number of losses this team can have for 2025-26 would be five.
That's really good, though it's not the amazing part.
This is:
Carla Berube is in her 23rd season as a college basketball head coach. Counting this season, she will have lost five games or fewer in 13 of those seasons.
Amazing, right?
Actually, it becomes more incredible when you consider that only two of her first 10 teams at Tufts lost five or fewer, which means means that 11 of her last 13 teams have lost five games or fewer — including four of six at Princeton.
Hey, if you want to throw in the four years she played at UConn, where none of those teams lost more than four games in a season, and in her 27 seasons as a player and head coach, she's up to 17 that have lost five or fewer.
Oh, and this is the 14th straight year that her teams have lost two or fewer league games in a season. Fourteen?
Think about it. Five losses? That's not a lot. Two league losses? That's also not a lot.
Her overall record as she heads to Ivy Madness is 529-123. That's a winning percentage of .811.
Her record at Princeton is 145-27. That's a winning percentage of .843. Within the league? She's 77-7. That's .917.
Nine. One Seven.
Also, she has a dog named "Scooby Berube." That might be the best thing about her. Just kidding. Just kidding.
Berube and her staff of Lauren Gosselin, Lauren Dillon, Jordan Edwards and Lilly Paro were honored, again, as the Ivy League's Coaching Staff of the Year when the league awards were announced yesterday.
In addition, Princeton had five players who received All-Ivy honors. To show you how balanced this group is, every one of those five has been the team's best player on more than one night this season.
Madison St. Rose, who averaged 16.0 points per game this season, one year after suffering a torn ACL, was the team's lone first-team pick. St. Rose's resume now includes an Ivy League Rookie of the Year award and a second-team All-Ivy selection as a sophomore.
St. Rose went over the 1,000-point mark earlier this season. It's likely that the next 1,000-point scorer in program history will be Skye Belker, a second-team selection this season for the second-straight time. Belker brings 971 points with her into the Ivy tournament.
Fadima Tall was also a second-team selection for the second-straight year. Tall was a two-time Ivy League and National Player of the Week winner this season, is the team's leading rebounder and improved her shooting percentage (.408-.456) and three-point percentage (.323-.373).
To give you an example of the balance TB mentioned, consider that Ashley Chea and Olivia Hutcherson were both honorable mention selections. Has a team ever had two better honorable mention selections?
None of those numbers and none of those honors will matter once the ball goes up Friday in Ithaca, and for whatever comes after that for this team.
At the same time, it's not a bad moment to take stock in what Carla Berube has put together in her career.
As TB said, it's definitely amazing.
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